Pirate Bay founder slams 'political' trial

Prosecution cannot understand chaotic structure of TPB

On a day in which one of Pirate Bay's founders has accused the IFPI of creating a 'political trial', a leading media industry analyst that told TechRadar that technology will always outpace legal regimes and the courts.

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde ('brokep') refused to answer questions pertaining to his attitudes to copyright put to him by the IFPI's Peter Danowsky in court in Stockholm this week.

The IFPI rep quoted from TPB's Peter Sunde's blog Brokep.com, but the Pirate Bay defendant slammed the line of questioning, claiming:

"That is a political issue. Is this a political trial or a legal trial?"

Sunde pressed on, telling the IFPI: "I want an answer from the lawyer Danowsky. Is this a political trial? Can I get a reply?" None was forthcoming.

P2P on trial: important cases

"If you look at the case law involved in file-trading and copyright, the original Napster, everything flows from that," says Mike McGuire, Vice President of Media Research at Gartner Industry Advisory Research.

"However, you also have to acknowledge the importance, at least in US copyright law, of the Sony v. Universal ("substantial non-infringing uses" and "time-shifting") as informing the issues surrounding PirateBay," the P2P file-sharing expert added.

"Notions of secondary and contributory infringement seem to be at the heart of the PirateBay case. So in the past 10 years, you have to look at Napster, MGM-Grokster and, in Europe, the BumaStemra v. Kazaa (secondary liability which is at issue in PirateBay); TechnoDesign v. Brein (which was interesting in that it ruled search engines for locating MP3 files were not infringing because lots of non-infringing files could be downloaded using the search engine)."

McGuire agrees that the Pirate Bay case "is probably going to shake out as one of the top handful of copyright cases that will add to the body of law that might, someday, be able to find a way to co-exist with rapidly evolving technologies."

Pirate Bay trial: day 5

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde ('brokep') has been cross examined about his status within the organisation and his attitudes towards copyright theft in the on-going Pirate Bay case in Stockholm.

Torrentfreak.com reports that "one of the themes so far is how the Prosecutor is struggling to come to terms with the somewhat chaotic structure of the TPB's operations.

"Trying to pin down Peter's role, [the Prosecution] asked about his position as TPB spokesman - Peter said he took the unofficial position since no-one else in the team wanted to do it….The Prosecutor continued to struggle with the apparent lack of a formal decision-making structure at TPB, continually referring to TPB as a "company"."

Sunde was then asked what the point of The Pirate Bay was, to which he replied: "It is to enable users to share their material with others."

"Even though it is copyrighted?" asked Danowsky.

"That can sometimes be the sad consequences," Sunde replied, stressing that 80 per cent of the content linked by the site is not copyrighted and that there is more illegal material on YouTube.